Publicity stunt
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A publicity stunt is a planned event designed to attract the public's attention to the promoters or their causes. Publicity stunts can be professionally organised or set up by amateurs.
Amateur stunts can be trivial or deathly serious. Among the trivial are students occupying a university building to highlight grievances, politicians progressively releasing leaked material to boost their profiles, software companies challenging hackers, etc. Serious publicity stunts include strikes, mass demonstrations, hijacks, kidnappings, hunger strikes, and murders.
This also makes clear that many publicity stunts try to exploit succès de scandale mechanisms for attracting attention.
Many people would maintain that attempts to raise awareness of serious causes are not "stunts". That depends on the point of view of the observer.
One way of perhaps drawing a distinction might be to label as stunts, events specifically designed to attract publicity. Events designed to gain an objective and which incidentally attract publicity can be exempted from the term. For instance, if an animal rights enthusiast were to rescue a dancing bear in India and that action became known through a report on a court case, that would not be a publicity stunt. If however, the activist arranged for the press to cover the rescue, it would be a publicity stunt.
The media itself often stage stunts for movies and television shows. The photo of a man at a gas station was a publicity stunt for the series Corner Gas, where CTV paid for 400 tanks of gas for area commuters.
Some record companies famously use publicity stunts to promote new material from artists on their roster. A famous example would be The Beatles 'Rooftop Gig' in Central London. More recently, in 2003, after a 1 year hiatus, Britney Spears appeared at the MTV Video Music Awards to promote her upcoming album. Rather than simply performing a song taken from the album, Britney Spears took to the stage for a collaboration with Madonna and so-called rival Christina Aguilera. The performance in itself would have brought a lot of attention from the media, but an unexpected faux-sapphic kiss between Madonna and Britney Spears stole the limelight, and subsequently the media spotlight worldwide. This was a key marketing tool for the record company, and was key in the launch of the album. Incidentally, the album debuted at #1 on the Billboard Charts.
